This proposal describes a plan to develop and test cost-containment-oriented, immediately-useable criteria for the planning of coronary care units. These criteria will help eliminate the difficulty planners currently experience due to the primitiveness of existing coronary care unit planning criteria. Coronary care unit planning criteria with an emphasis on cost effectiveness will be created by reviewing and examining existing criteria and the literature on coronary care unit treatment. In addition, methods for performing cost-impact analyses to accompany coronary care unit planning will be developed and tested. The criteria will be field tested using a powerful method which has not previously been useable because of the absence of adequate diagnosis-based planning data bases. Fortunately, it is now possible to use this method for the first time, because the state of New Jersey has recently developed a unique, sophisticated, diagnosis-based data base for its federally-funded prospective reimbursement demonstration project and this data base is admirably suited, and will be used for the field test. The field test will allow the refinement and strengthening of the criteria by comparing them to diagnosis-based criteria which are similar in form to medical audit criteria, and which will be directly derived from a thorough, current understanding of the practice of cost-effecitve, high quality coronary care medicine. A final report, descrbing the reviews and work conducted by the project, and containing recommendations for using the tested coronary care unit criteria for cost-containment-oriented planning with data bases of differing degress of sophistication, and suggestions for future use of the diagnosis-based planning methodology, will be written, for use by health planners.